PHARMACY MANAGEMENT
• Work-life balance is important, and pharmacists managers are not alone in their challenges to
find such balance. Given that it is difficult for professionals to completely «finish their work» at the end of the day, it is essential to establish priorities. This makes it easier to stop working at the end of the day and focus on other life interests and commitments.
Work-Life Balance
• The nature of pharmacy work makes managing time especially difficult.
• For example in a community pharmacy, meeting patients’ needs, fulfilling management requirements
cn consume much of the workday and leave little time for other activities such as counseling patients and developing medication plans.
• Effectively managing time to be able to pursue meaninful activities requires an
Barriers to Effective Time Management
Some reasons of time management challenges:1. Technical errors (disorginized work space, multi-tasking)
2. External realities (a health condition limits your energy, new life events, working with disorganized people)
3. Psychological obstacles (fear of downtime, a belief that it is more important to care for others that it is to take care of ourselves, worries that adding structure to one’s life, unclear priorities)
Assessing your Current Level of Effectiveness
The first step is to spending a few days mapping the way time is used. You should record how you spend each hour, whether the ctivity was planned or unplanned, who was involved, and the degree to which the activity is aligned with your goals.
Maximizing Productivity
When it comes to managing both our time and our effectiveness, there are six key areas of emphasis:
• Focus: Establishing clear priorities aligned with personal and professional priorities.
• Organization: Minimizing clutter and ensuring that everything has a proper place and is easily accesible.
• Systems: Creating processes and using approaches that increases efficiency and minimizing mistakes.
• Rituals: Engaging in regular practices that maintain amergy, purpose, and focus.
Focusing on What Matters Most
Defining what matters is a key step in managing on’s time. Focusing on what matters most requires to determine which things will make you feel most successful.
A classic experiment conducted in the late 1990s by researchers from Harvard University was designed to test people’s ability to focus. In this experiment, viewers were instructed to watch a video and count the number of times a basketball was passed among members of the same team. During the course of the videotaped game, a gorilla enters the screen, thumps his chest, and moves on. At the conclusion of the video, viewers are askes how many times the ball was passed and whether they noticed anytthing unusual. Most viewers were focused on the counting exercise, they failed to notice the gorilla. When shown the tape again, manyy refused to believe it was the same footage.
Researchers called it «inattentional blindness» paying so much attention to one thing that you fail to notice other things.
Focusing on What Matters Most
While focus positive attribute, it is important to focus on right things. When we focus on the things that do not matter, we tend to miss important opportunities.
Theferore, before addressing how to get things done, it is essential to determine which things are most important.
The types of activities: 1. Important and urgent,
2. Important but not urgent, 3. Not important but urgent, 4. Not important not urgent.
It is recommended that the most enduring benefits come from focusing on important but not urgent activities, for example; forging relationships with members of the pharmacy profession. These are not urgent but can reduce time and create future opportunities.
Getting Organized
Walk into some people’s work spaces and you will see well-organized manuals, orderly files, and ample empty desk space. Visit others and you will observe numerous open journals, haphazardly placed files, sticky notes poted around the edge of the computer monitor, and several photos and items.
The key requirement is having enough space to work, determining a place for everything, and knowing where to find it when you need it.
The Power of Planning
Good planning incorporates determining tasks that must be accomplished to reach goals and scheduling time required to complete them.
A critical planning tool is a good to-do list that consolidates all tasks, responsibilities, and commitments into one record.
Scheduling
• Step 1: Listing the activities from important and urgent to not important and not urgent.
• Step 2: Identify the time you want to make available for spesific goals. This will depend on the
design of your activity. Schedule appropriate contingency time. You will learn how much of this you need by experience.
• The more you familiar with the job, the less you spend time.
Minimizing Procrastination
Procrastination is a behaviour that can be the result of several factors, including perfectionism, fear of failure, or even fear of success. To overcome procrastination, it is often helpful to ask yourself a series of questions:
1. Whay am I putting this off? 2. What is worrying me?
3. What are my instinct telling me? 4. Can I do part of the project?
5. Can I delegate this to someone else?
Establishing Essential Rituals
• Planning for tommorow today: one of the most common and effective strategies is to
determine the first and second priorities for the day ahead before leaving work each day.
• Tacking the top priority first: Using the to-do list developed the day before, effective
time managers start their workday by working on the day’s most important priority.
• Observing personal energy cycles: Most managers function at their absolute best
during certain hours of the day. Are you the morning person or night person? How many breaks do you need within a day? How many hours can you spend doing the same task?
• The key is to break your current pattern by doing something different ans something
Using Delegation to Your Advantage
• Managers should delegate tasks better suited for others when possible and
appropriate.
• Managers should not delegate all tasks they find unpleasant, but if a task
requires a particular skill, knowledge, or experience that astaff member possesses, delegation may be appropriate.
• For example if you find it difficult to control the marketing authorization files of a
drug one-by-one, you may be identify an employee who is able to check the files.
• A key to effective leadership and management is surrounding yourself with
